


This House

by Alley_Skywalker



Category: House - Patrick Wolf (Song)
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Married Couple
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-22
Updated: 2011-12-22
Packaged: 2017-10-27 17:42:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/298377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alley_Skywalker/pseuds/Alley_Skywalker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A young man thinks on what the new house he bought with his wife means to him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This House

**Author's Note:**

  * For [activevirtues](https://archiveofourown.org/users/activevirtues/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide!

Light bunnies float through the room at eleven in the morning, magnified and scattered over the carpet by the glass doors leading out onto the porch and the garden beyond. Now, with the summer almost here, the leaves are bright green and the flower beds she planted are blooming in rainbow colors. The smell of waffles and coffee floats through the rooms and hangs in the air, inviting me to the kitchen but I want to finish writing out this last line. She will call me when it is time.

I hold my pen between both hands, spinning it back and forth, chewing lightly on the top. I’ve set out to an interesting task – painting a picture in words. I do this a lot as a writer but this particular task is different. I want to put together a perfect personification of this house – new and bright and full of laughter – and the life I lead now in it. I write better here than I ever did in my old flat back in the city before we were married. But this is proving to be a difficult task. This house is so many things to me.

This house is waking up in the morning as the sun just begins to seep through the white curtains she hung up and slide and slip over the bed, into her dark hair and over her pale skin as she lies pressed up against my side, warm and soft.

This house is the smell of cooking food. Pancakes or omelet in the morning, hamburgers, German sausages or pasta for lunch, and a vibrant variety of cousins from around the world for dinner. She loves to cook and she especially loves to cook for me. On the weekends she often bakes pies and cakes, brownies and rolls.

This house is the crying and laughter of a small child, pink and scrunch-faced, who reaches up and grabs my finger into his tiny fist. It’s the sound of rattlers and lullaby songs, her singing melded together with the burbling of a small boy who still hasn’t learned to crawl.

This house is the goldfish she named Mario and her bright bird statuettes which contrast against the dark wooden furniture. It is the designs on the carpets and the color schemes on the walls that she picked out and that are soothing and soft in tone.

This house is the garden she planted. The flowerbeds bloom in the spring and the summer and the yellow leaves that create yellow and orange carpets in the fall. She and I take short walks in the late evening around its perimeter, like a lord and his lady overlooking their landholdings.

This house is our memories put together, intertwining our lives as though there had never been a time when we weren’t acquainted. She puts photographs all over the place – on tables, on bookshelves, above the fireplace, on the kitchen counter – and she always encourages me to do the same. Her family and my family become one, flowing gradually into our own family. Her friends and mine fill the halls with laughter, intermixing as though they all know each other. There are funny pictures and serious picture, nice pictures and sloppy and fuzzy but precious ones.

This house is her. Her dark silky hair as it slips through my fingers and her dark eyes as they look into mine. It’s her lithe body as I hold her in my arms when we dace and as she lies beneath me when we make love. It is her voice, soft and soothing, floating like a warm breeze on a summer day, rustling through leaves and tall grass. It’s her, dancing across the living room barefoot in panties and a bra. It’s her tearful smile as she insists that everything is alright when she’s been crying over an oldies song or soap opera. It is her teaching plans and student homework scattered all over the study – on the desk and the sofa and the floor. It is how she smells of baked goods and fresh perfume, sometimes of soap and vanilla.

This house is me with my urban-boy slob habits. If her papers are in the study, mine find their place into all the other places – the kitchen, the porch, the nursery, the bathroom sink counter… My clothes are flung over chair backs and she tells me to pick them up and take them into the laundry room in a tone of a strict school teacher. It is me and my neurotic habits and perverse love for action flicks with zombies. Me with my desire to have a dog some day that looks just like the one I had in my childhood. It is my fire that I start in the fireplace on cold evenings and my car parked outside, gleaming in the sun and needing both a wash and repairs. It is my love to dance with her to old recordings of jazz musicians in the living room, around and around until we are both dizzy.

This house is us and our love. The love that started out in a coffee shop in Boston, among small tables and early mornings and late nights of Americano. Our love that is violent and tender, that is filling and emptying, purifying and sinfully delicious. Our love which lives in every corner and nook, every wall and window, every single inch of this house. It is the way I feel when she is with me and I think that right now, if we had never met, I could be alone, smoking away my life in my simple flat with nothing but a pen and a piece of paper with a foul tendency to stay blank to keep me company.

This house is my unadulterated happiness. And I don’t know how to personify that.

Her voice floats through the rooms, lilting, calling me to come have breakfast. I set aside my writing, vowing to return to it later. She meets me in the kitchen, holding a glass of orange juice in one hand and flaunting a bright sundress. I kiss her and she smiles.

I love her. I love everything about this. I love this house.

It symbolizes all of the above.


End file.
